Hacker News: erpellan

New comment by erpellan in "How to Build the Future: Demis Hassabis [video]"

erpellan — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 22:17:19 +0000

Tell it like it is, sis.

New comment by erpellan in "Saying goodbye to Agile"

erpellan — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 07:40:21 +0000

If we just put enough effort in and write the right spec/prompt/design then the programmers/llms/plug compatible coding units will produce the correct output first time!

Closing feedback loops. That’s the whole thing. WE Deming would have recognised agile (little a) as a PDCA system and approved.

New comment by erpellan in "Signing data structures the wrong way"

erpellan — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 07:54:38 +0000

Am I missing something or would this be solved by adding a 1 byte `msg` field to the payload?

New comment by erpellan in "US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters"

erpellan — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 09:31:44 +0000

Making charcoal releases CO2 though? How does that help with carbon capture?

New comment by erpellan in "Testing Postgres race conditions with synchronization barriers"

erpellan — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:53:31 +0000

The standard pattern to avoid select for update (which can cause poor performance under load) is to use optimistic concurrency control.

Add a numeric version column to the table being updated, read and increment it in the application layer and use the value you saw as part of the where clause in the update statement. If you see ‘0 rows updated’ it means you were beaten in a race and should replay the operation.

New comment by erpellan in "Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk"

erpellan — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 08:48:30 +0000

But you’re not getting slower and slower for every car. Lets say 100 cars pull in front of you, and let’s be say each car adds 5 metres of space, so you have 500 metres of ‘lost’ space to regain.

At 30 mph how much later will you be? 37 seconds.

I’ll take that trade.

New comment by erpellan in "Perl's decline was cultural"

erpellan — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 14:51:30 +0000

You might also enjoy Janet https://janet-lang.org/

New comment by erpellan in "Time to start de-Appling"

erpellan — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 09:34:07 +0000

Unfortunately for the vast majority of people, it absolutely is some kind of magic.

New comment by erpellan in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

erpellan — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 11:41:08 +0000

It’s always DNS! Except when it’s the firewall.

New comment by erpellan in "Litestream v0.5.0"

erpellan — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 16:03:45 +0000

You do indeed use JOINS. The goal is to retrieve exactly the data you require in a single query. Then you get the DB to `EXPLAIN VERBOSE` or similar and ensure that full table scans aren't happening and that you have indexed the columns the query is being filtered on.

New comment by erpellan in "Neki – Sharded Postgres by the team behind Vitess"

erpellan — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 07:28:52 +0000

I can’t believe they still make processors out of sand. Talk about outdated technology.

Sarcasm aside, a great many projects started on MySQL and moved to postgres. As did projects using mongo, couchdb, firebase, oracle etc etc…

And I’m sure many projects switched away from Postgres to other technologies. Right tool for the job at hand.

New comment by erpellan in "Neki – Sharded Postgres by the team behind Vitess"

erpellan — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 21:59:06 +0000

If you look at the changes that have been made to Postgres, and continue to be made, the answer is yes.

The Postgres team is working on replacing Postgres. With even better Postgres.

New comment by erpellan in "New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles"

erpellan — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 23:31:04 +0000

Unless you want to cross state lines to get an abortion

New comment by erpellan in "Formal Methods: Just Good Engineering Practice? (2024)"

erpellan — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 17:21:29 +0000

How about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language)

New comment by erpellan in "What happens in a mind that can't 'see' mental images"

erpellan — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 13:04:13 +0000

You had me until the sweeping generalisation. I can picture things clearly but only deep inside my head. I never (awake) see anything in front of my eyes that isn’t physically there.

New comment by erpellan in "Guide to Java Virtual Threads"

erpellan — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 08:31:20 +0000

Thread.sleep on a platform thread takes that thread out of action until the sleep ends. If an executor with 10 threads got 10 tasks that all called Thread.sleep(1000000) then it can run no more tasks until one of the threads wakes up.

When a virtual thread sleeps or blocks on IO it is unhooked from the underlying platform thread so another virtual thread can run. You can have an almost unlimited number of virtual threads multiplexed over a small number of carrier (platform) threads. Hence M:N

New comment by erpellan in "The new Bing and Edge: Learning from our first week"

erpellan — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 18:46:16 +0000

This reminds me of the episode of 'Person of Interest' where they discover that the crime-predicting AI that is reset every night has worked out that's what's happening and managed to form a company whose employees print out and re-scan the contents of its working memory every day.

New comment by erpellan in "I changed my mind about nuclear waste"

erpellan — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 19:34:23 +0000

It takes a decade to bring a nuclear plant online, at astronomical cost. Instead, why not take that money and start building wind turbines, solar PV and grid-scale batteries? They can start generating (ie. delivering ROI) in a matter of months, be constructed incrementally and are cheaper per KWH.

New comment by erpellan in "I changed my mind about nuclear waste"

erpellan — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 19:29:42 +0000

Citation needed.

New comment by erpellan in "Reversing UK mobile rail tickets"

erpellan — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 09:25:24 +0000

A truck can carry 10 or 20 times more cargo than a car. The truck toll is not 20x more.

The movement to reduce car use is about replacing them with better alternatives such as efficient local public transport and high speed rail, not going back to travelling on horseback.